Last week, I started a long post in response to antediluvian flood (heh) of stupidity in the comments section of this Boston Globe story. on the "debate" (similar to the bullshit, trumped-up "debate" between evolutionary biologists and creationist PR flacks) about the effectiveness of the New Deal. I mean, Amity Schlaes! (And some of her proponents - yes, the ever weak-ass globeisatrocious - can't even spell her name right!)
But my post ran several hundred words and wasn't close to finished. After all, modern American discourse generates such copious quantities of bullshit that even Hercules couldn't clean it all up. (He was a horseshit specialist anyway.)
So, I'll try to shovel away the wingnut bullshit one cow patty at a time. Here's the talk radio talking point that one clearly evident moron called jkkite (January 15, 7:41 AM) has taken away from Rush or some other manipulating dipshit:
everyone knows the wealthiest people in this country pay about 90% of all the tax revenues. it's a fact. please keep your uneducated comments out of this, thx.This an exaggeration of a Republican talking point, and it's a, well, outright lie that depends on the ignorance of those who want to believe it. Here's the Republican talking point, dressed up as best it can be, though still carefully ignoring the reality of the vast expansion of payroll taxes, which hit the working poor and the middle class, labelled "Percent of Federal Income Taxes Paid, 1980–2004" by the Hoover Institute (which couldn't have a more appropriate name):
The top 1% of incomes earn around $350,000 a year and up (2005 numbers here). If we match up these incomes with jkkite's "wealthiest people," we find in fact that they pay roughly 38% of income taxes (not all taxes by any stretch). In wingnut-world, that's totally close to 90%, right?
If 38% still seems like a lot, here's a funny thing: The top 1% of the wealthy own 40% of the private financial wealth in America (and 33% of the bigger pie that includes owner occupied housing). That tax rate doesn't seem so unfair now, does it? (Note: The top 1% of incomes and the top 1% of wealth are not exactly the same, but they overlap strongly.)
Furthermore, income tax receipts are a large part of Federal revenue, but they are just a little over 40% of the total, which makes the top 1%'s burden about 16% of the whole bundle.
The biggest other source? Payroll taxes - Social Security and Medicare - which are flat taxes up to their caps but then become completely regressive. The average rape and pillage CEO pays exactly the same amount on these as anyone earning over the cap of $102,000 (p. 61 of the 1040 booklet I received this year).
Soooo, if jkkite really cared about keeping uneducated comments out of the discussion, he'd have to SHUT UP!
